Maxwell School News and Commentary

"The state’s new election system, combining nonpartisan primaries and instant-runoff general election voting, makes elections more competitive and encourages cooperative governance," writes Richard Barton, assistant teaching professor of public administration and international affairs.

"Primary elections are where most of those who govern us are chosen. Can making them nonpartisan—or eliminating them altogether—diminish the impact of ideological fringes? What has happened in Louisiana suggests that it can," writes Richard Barton, assistant teaching professor of public administration and international affairs and policy studies.

The governor of New York possesses too much formal power to think about writing her off, says Grant Reeher, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. “She has an enormous amount of power in the budget,” he says, “and that’s the thing that’s coming up next.”

"There’s resistance to change in procedures when there is a vested interest in the way things are being done," says Grant Reeher, professor of political science and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute.